(a) Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a carbon-platinum core-shell type catalyst for fuel cells and a method for preparing the same. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to a carbon-platinum core-shell type catalyst for fuel cells including carbon as a core and platinum as a shell which can solve durability-associated problems under PEMFC operation conditions and furthermore tackle manufacturing cost-related problems and process complexity by improving acid resistance through incorporation of a carbon material rather than a transition metal into catalysts and a method for preparing the same.
(b) Background Art
For several tens of years, nanometer-scale metal particles have been studied in a variety of application fields due to unique properties thereof. In particular, platinum has been used for a variety of catalytic reactions including fuel cells due to excellent surface activity, but has a great application restriction due to price and limited natural reserves.
Accordingly, in order to solve this problem, there is a need for development of catalysts for reducing platinum. The most potential method is to synthesize core-shell structured nanoparticles alloyed from platinum and a transition metal. This can reduce the amount of platinum. The prior art related to this includes:
(1) Korean Patent Laid-open No. 10-2016-0038060,
(2) Carbon Quantum Dots and Their Derivative 3D Porous Carbon Frameworks for Sodium-Ion Batteries with Ultralong Cycle Life, Hongshuai Hou, Craig E. Banks, Mingjun Jing, Yan Zhang, and Xiaobo Ji, Advanced Materials, 27, 7861, 2015, and
(3) Preparation of Pt/C catalyst using alcohol reduction and a polyol process in the presence of urea for oxygen reduction reaction, Hyunh-Suk Oh, Jong-Gil OH, Youn-Gi Hong, Raj Kishore Sharma, Yong-Gun Shul, and HanSung Kim, Research on Chemical Intermediates, 34,853, 2008.
However, disadvantageously, core-shell catalysts entail a complicated production process and have deteriorated cell performance caused by elution and dissociation of transition metals under PEMFC conditions including strong acidic conditions. Therefore, there were a variety of attempts to solve these problems.
However, the problems could not be fundamentally solved due to weak acid resistance of transition metal materials. Accordingly, there is a need to incorporate highly acid-resistant and inexpensive materials which can replace transition metals. Furthermore, there is an increasing need to tackle problems associated with manufacturing costs and complexity of the manufacturing process.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the disclosure and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.